What's a good phone now that doesn't force ads on me?
I'm using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I'm looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don't want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there phones that don't suck nowadays? I can buy a phone that is sold in the US, Canada, or EU.
(I don't want to go through menus to disable ads (Xiaomi), and I'm currently looking at phones other than the Pixel lineup to see if there's a better option for me)
(I also don't want to mess around with custom bootloaders/systems, I rely on Google services way too much)
EDIT: If it wasn't clear enough, I am not looking for things like GrapheneOS or LineageOS or others, I am looking for a phone and judging based on the stock system on it.
ELI5 swapping the DNS? (I know what it is, but thought that wasn't possible on the device.)
I believe you just add that to your network settings for private dns.
Go to settings - network & Internet - scroll down to see Private DNS and add a DNS of your choice like dns.adguard-dns.com.
Worked for me so far as I use pihole on WiFi at home but now not seeing adds on mobile data like I used to.
Update, this will override all DNS settings it seems. Just did a test at home and it now points to this DNS vs my pihole. If someone knows a better way, please lmk otherwise I'll poke around more.
Unfortunately, there isn't one, since it's working as intended, short of pointing the phone DNS and Pihole to the same servers.
You're overriding the DNS of the phone to point to the new server, and it will prioritise that over asking the router for one, like it might otherwise do if there wasn't one configured.
Got it, that makes sense. Just wasn't sure if Android had an option to only update per radio/device/adapter like you can in Windows and Linux.
For now, I'll just switch it when I'm on the go. Thank you!
Tried that. We'll see if it works!